Former Vancouver Canucks fan favourite Gino Odjick is still grappling with the effects of numerous concussions, more than 12 years after his NHL career ended. The celebrated hockey enforcer is pictured in Vancouver on Jan. 29, 2014.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

Former Vancouver Canucks fan favourite Gino Odjick is still grappling with the effects of numerous concussions, more than 12 years after his NHL career ended. The celebrated hockey enforcer is pictured in Vancouver on Jan. 29, 2014.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

Former Vancouver Canucks fan favourite Gino Odjick is still grappling with the effects of numerous concussions, more than 12 years after his NHL career ended. The celebrated hockey enforcer is pictured in Vancouver on Jan. 29, 2014.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

Former Vancouver Canucks fan favourite Gino Odjick is still grappling with the effects of numerous concussions, more than 12 years after his NHL career ended. The celebrated hockey enforcer is pictured in Vancouver on Jan. 29, 2014.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

Former Vancouver Canucks fan favourite Gino Odjick is still grappling with the effects of numerous concussions, more than 12 years after his NHL career ended. The celebrated hockey enforcer is pictured in Vancouver on Jan. 29, 2014.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

Former Vancouver Canucks fan favourite Gino Odjick is still grappling with the effects of numerous concussions, more than 12 years after his NHL career ended. The celebrated hockey enforcer is pictured in Vancouver on Jan. 29, 2014.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

Former Vancouver Canucks fan favourite Gino Odjick is still grappling with the effects of numerous concussions, more than 12 years after his NHL career ended. The celebrated hockey enforcer is pictured in Vancouver on Jan. 29, 2014.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

Former Vancouver Canucks fan favourite Gino Odjick is still grappling with the effects of numerous concussions, more than 12 years after his NHL career ended. The celebrated hockey enforcer is pictured in Vancouver on Jan. 29, 2014.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

Former Vancouver Canucks fan favourite Gino Odjick is still grappling with the effects of numerous concussions, more than 12 years after his NHL career ended. The celebrated hockey enforcer is pictured in Vancouver on Jan. 29, 2014.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

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VANCOUVER — That Gino Odjick’s brain has signs of hockey-related trauma, 12 years after he retired from the National Hockey League, is no surprise.

For the first time in a public forum, however, the former Vancouver Canucks enforcer acknowledged that he has a mental illness, a condition he suspects is linked to the pounding he took as an NHL player. Odjick provided powerful testimony Tuesday at a sports-related concussion symposium at the Chan Centre for Family Health Education at B.C. Children’s Hospital.

Odjick played 12 seasons in the NHL — including eight in Vancouver, where he was a fan favourite — and racked up 2,567 penalty minutes. By the time his career ended as a Montreal Canadien in 2002, Odjick admitted he had trouble finding the rink.

“I remember, in the last two years of my career, getting a concussion, going into Philly and walking around,” Odjick explained. “People just looked like Martians. They looked like they were from another planet. I couldn’t remember how to get to the rink for half the season. I was totally forgetful. I couldn’t remember what time it was, what I was supposed to be doing. It was just one turn to the right, one turn to the left to get to the rink, but I got lost just going there. Everybody (players) wanted to play me in the simplest of card games because they knew they could beat me.”

Odjick related how his hockey fights developed into a strange addiction. He craved the blows, both in delivering and receiving them, because it confirmed his worth as a hockey player.

“It’s funny,” he explained. “When you’re designated as an enforcer, on a regular basis, there comes a time when you’re addicted to hitting. When you don’t get hit in the face for a while, it kind of bothers you. It made me feel alive, to get hit. It showed that I was involved, sticking up for my teammates. It was something I could never understand myself. I felt the need to get hit.”

Odjick talked of spending seven minutes in the penalty box as a minor-league player “seeing nothing but stars.” And he said he welcomed the pain when the Penguins’ Jay Caufield caught him with an elbow in a February 1991 game that fractured his cheekbone because it partly masked the symptoms of the ensuing concussion.

“I was out (knocked cold) on the ice for a while,” Odjick said. “That was a whole lot easier to take because I had the pain of the broken cheekbone. The pain kept me from focusing on what was happening to my brain.”

“When Gino said he was ‘addicted’ to getting hit, it really blew me away,” admitted neuroscientist Naz Virji-Babul, one of the medical professionals who spoke at the symposium. “It tells you something about what’s happening in the brain to crave that aspect, which would make you go back again and again. When kids get injured (concussions), we don’t think about the long-term implications of mental illness. He (Odjick) totally understands that now.”

While the timing of the concussion symposium was coincidental, it was scheduled on Jan. 28, marking Bell’s fourth annual ‘Let’s Talk’ day to raise awareness of mental health issues in Canada. As well, Winnipeg Jets players wore Rick Rypien jerseys during warm-ups for Tuesday’s game against the Nashville Predators at the MTS Centre in Winnipeg.

Rypien, who spent six years in the Canucks’ organization, took his own life in 2011 after signing a contract to play for the Jets.

Odjick, Marco Iannuzzi of the B.C. Lions, youth soccer player Ella Mahaffey and 10-year-old hockey player Alyssa Wellar were among the athletes speaking at the symposium moderated by Hockey Hall of Fame goalie Ken Dryden, who has become a powerful advocate for concussion awareness.

The Calgary-born Iannuzzi was aware of the potentially catastrophic and long-term effects of concussions, even before he joined college football ranks with the Harvard Crimson. In high school, Iannuzzi was a running back but he purposely switched to receiver in college because of the lessened instances of concussion.

“I knew that a running back had an average career of 2.8 years,” Iannuzzi explained. “A receiver was six, seven or eight years. That’s primarily because of head injuries. The decision was made early in my career to put myself on a path where I would be least susceptible for concussions.”

On Oct. 12, 2012, in a game against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, however, the Lions receiver — in the act of reaching for a pass — was given a cheap shot from defender Dee Webb. The ensuing whiplash, from striking the ground, caused Iannuzzi to black out. He passed the SCAT test (a baseline test to determine if a player has a concussion), but Iannuzzi knew, in his mind, that he was concussed.

He already had his own self-administered plan for recovery in place from concussion research he had studied at Harvard. The university is known for its proactive and accelerated investigations into the broad-ranging health problem plaguing professional, amateur and youth athletes.

“At any moment, I’m ready to pull the chute,” Iannuzzi said. “If I have to stop playing, because I get a concussion, I’m ready to do that now, because of what I know.”

Tellingly, Iannuzzi told the symposium he would find it difficult to place his son in football, if that was the direction he chose to go. Miles Iannuzzi, the couple’s third child, is just three weeks old.

“My wife and I finally had our first boy,” he said. “Everyone says, ‘Aren’t you so excited you have a boy, because now he can be a football player just like you?’ Some part of me really wishes we had another girl, because it places me in a position of deciding whether he should play football down the road. From everything I’ve learned, it’s a very difficult decision for me to make, knowing I’ve been lucky to this point. But who’s to say he will be?”

The recent spotlight on brain trauma in professional football and hockey has captivated the sports media, but it’s a public health issue that must be placed in proper context.

Young athletes with developing brains, particularly girls, are more susceptible to mild traumatic brain injuries and take longer to recover, as Mahaffey and Wellar explained in interviews documenting their long and difficult roads back from injury.

Symposium organizer Dr. Shelina Babul, of B.C. Children’s Hospital, has developed a free, online training tool for players, parents and coaches — Concussion Awareness Training Tool — for what to do when an athlete suffers a concussion.

The tool will be released in March.

As for Odjick, he said he is coping with his condition by taking medication and looking after himself.

“I’m exercising, going to see doctors, trying to get on the right medication,” he said. “I had a bad spell a while back.”

On Nov. 2, Odjick participated in the jersey retirement ceremony of his friend, former Canuck sniper Pavel Bure, at Rogers Arena. A month later, Odjick was admitted to a hospital psychiatric unit in Quebec, where he had travelled after the death of his father. Previously, he had spent a few days in the psychiatric ward at UBC hospital in early September.

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